While at EuroComm this year I grabbed 5 minutes with one of our most provocative speakers, Christian Bluemelhuber, Professor for Communication at the University of Arts in Berlin.

In the quick interview below I asked him about his presentation on his wonderfully different marketing and communication model for brands.

Although I haven’t yet had a chance to speak further with him, based on what I heard, this sounds to me like an incredibly apposite model for redefining brand marketing and communication as we head towards web 3.0.

Check out the video below, then let’s unpack it a little.

This time the consumer will lead

By privileging the consumer response to our brand media, by experimenting, and at the same time offering stability, Christian believes that marketers and communicators will be able to create brands that truly transform.

There’s quite some depth and complexity in his model. For the moment, here in my own words is a skim across the surface:

A Trinity of Marketing

Porn: In Christian’s model, these are the smallest raw materials of brand communication – the individual stories or ‘experiences’ that you publish. The function of this ‘porn’ is to help the consumer explore your value as a brand.

Style: Over time, the recipients of our brand media will begin to find their own patterns within the stories. As Christian says:

“It is not the company who creates the brand, but the customer who elicits the brand.”

Series: This is the ultimate challenge of a brand – where we not only have recognisable patterns (or ‘style’) which we can reinforce, but also an actual transformation of the perception of the brand.

But innovation is difficult for all to manage – for communicators, marketers, and consumers. Hence we must also offer stability. We must compensate. So we should offer repetition or tautology in our stories.

As Christian ended in the interview, this balance of repetition and experimentation is the challenge for today’s big brands.

So why web 3.0?

I believe this an apposite model for web 3.0 because first, it acknowledges the massive influence of our new media ecology on brand consumption – and applies media, narrative, and behavioural elements too.

Far too often our media savvy goes as far as Paid, Owned, Earned media. Which, while useful in the old order, simply doesn’t accommodate any depth of understanding about the actual response to our content in modeling brand marketing communication strategy.

Essentially, web 3.0 is about context. Meaning. Behaviours. And where better to drive your brand strategy from than the elicited response to your brand communications?